SerpApi.Org
Paramount+ has never had a launch quite like Dutton Ranch, which arrived in May and pulled 12.9 million global views inside seven days, the biggest original series debut in the streamer's history, and managed that alongside an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score and a renewal confirmed by June 24. A good part of the pitch was the casting, with two Oscar-nominated screen veterans brought in to give Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler's move to Texas some weight beyond franchise familiarity.
One of those veterans now says the job wasn't the one he was sold. Speaking to Variety's Marc Malkin at Monday night's premiere of Apple TV comedy The Dink, the actor said he felt misled about how much his character would actually do across the first season of the Yellowstone sequel, and that he raised it with the production while filming was still underway.
Ed Harris, a four-time Oscar nominee, plays Everett McKinney, the Rio Paloma veterinarian and Vietnam War Navy veteran who becomes one of the few people in town willing to stand beside Beth and Rip. He told Varietyhe had been walked through the season in some detail before signing, and had understood he was one of four main characters, which turned out not to be the case. Midway through the shoot, by his own account, he was telling his team to "get me the f**k out of here." When he raised it with producers and said he felt underused and inconsequential, the response he got was a flat "Oh."
Harris shot a scene in which Everett gets called up to sing at the bar where Beth is drinking, and the song was cut, with the production telling him the moment sat too brightly against that episode's dark ending. He said at the time it felt like reason enough to void his contract, though he stopped short of naming Taylor Sheridan or Chad Feehan, the Season 1 showrunner, when describing who he complained to.
He is contracted for two seasons and says he has since been told McKinney will have a little more to do in the second, which arrives under a new showrunner, Benjamin Cavell, following Feehan's departure. There is room for it, given the finale left Carter kidnapped and the Mariano Reyes thread barely started, and given how much of Season 1 kept Everett at the edge of the frame as the town's decent man rather than a driver of plot.
Harris was on that red carpet for The Dink, a pickleball comedy that begins streaming on Apple TV on Friday, which is the sort of promotional obligation that can sometimes eke out candor like this. Whether Cavell writes the veterinarian a bigger season, or Harris quietly serves out the second half of a two-year deal, is now an interesting question hanging over the show.
